Collaboration reduces customer effort

Reduce Customer Effort by Scaling up Collaboration

Brands must get better at acting on customer insights

Being customer-centric is about more than just understanding how people interact with your business. It is about acting on that understanding to continuously improve the customer experience.

Customer effort scores serve as a barometer for brands to help improve their CX.

To do this you need to be able to break down the purchasing journey into quantifiable elements, which is where customer effort scores come in. Customer effort scores serve as a barometer for brands to help improve their CX, be it by simplifying processes, implementing more powerful technologies, improving the layout of stores, or giving collaborators more autonomy in their customer relations.

Some common measures of customer effort include:

Time invested

Money invested

Cognitive effort made

Procedural effort

Physical effort

Crucially, Customer Effort Scores force brands to truly scrutinize their sales and service approach from the customer’s point of view, putting them in a great position to change things for the better. After all, nobody wants to spend hours filling in forms and working through numerous steps just to open a bank account or submit a service request.

Not quite there yet

Customer Effort Scores force brands to truly scrutinize their sales and service approach from the customer’s point of view, putting them in a great position to change things for the better.

And yet it seems many businesses are not acting on the insights they collect, or in some cases not scrutinizing their CX with enough vigour to meet consumer expectations. Research from the AFRC (Association Française de la Relation Client) found that more than one-third of consumers say many of their interactions with brands only complicate their lives.

Brands are falling particularly short when it comes to service. According to a Harris Interactive poll, customer service agents fail to answer customers’ questions 50% of the time. Discouragingly, 80% of the time it takes service agents to resolve a customer issue is spent on research.

This simply isn’t good enough when dealing with digital consumers.

Time to better align marketing, sales and service

Digital channels continue to reshape how we interact with brands and what we expect from the purchasing journey, but they are equally valuable in helping companies deliver a better customer experience. By its nature, digital communication opens the door to two-way innovation.

Digital technologies like the cloud make greater collaboration between marketing, sales and service possible.

Most importantly, digital technologies like the cloud make greater collaboration between marketing, sales and service possible. Together, closer alignment on customer needs and the free flow of data between these three pillars of the business break down the operational barriers that stand in the way of pain-free customer interactions.

TH March, a UK-based insurance broker in the jewelry trade, adopted Oracle CX Cloud to integrate its marketing, sales and service function so it could gain a better view of customers and engage with them on a more individual basis. Today, service teams are able to resolve queries in real-time, sales and marketing strategies are informed by changing social sentiment data, and the company is continuously improving the way it serves customers.

Today’s consumer has more choice, a shorter attention span and less patience than ever before, and any interactions that fail to meet their high expectations can turn them off a brand for good. Loyalty is not unheard of but is increasingly rare, and even companies with exceptional products or services will struggle to maintain market share if they can’t deliver a customer experience to match.